My diigo daily 06/06/2007

This idea comes from a wonderful book called A Perfect Mess, which explains how not keeping a schedule has been key to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s success as a movie star, politician, and businessman over the last 20 years.

Want to meet with Arnold? Sure, drop on by. He’ll see you if he can. But you might want to call first. Sorry, he doesn’t schedule appointments in advance.

Keep three and only three lists: a Todo List, a Watch List, and a Later List.

Each night before you go to bed, prepare a 3×5 index card with a short list of 3 to 5 things that you will do the next day.

Then, throughout the rest of the day, use the back of the 3×5 card as your Anti-Todo List.

I’m not going to talk a lot about getting up early or going to bed late or anything else related to the course of a typical day, because everyone’s different.

But the thing that matters almost more than anything in determining whether I’ll have a happy, satisfying day is this: no matter what time you get up, start the day with a real, sit-down breakfast.

This serves two purposes.

First, it fuels you up. Study after study have shown that breakfast is, yes, the most important meal of the day. It’s critical to properly fuel the body for the day’s activities and it’s also critical to staying lean or losing weight. (People who don’t have breakfast tend to eat more, and worse, at lunch.)

Second, it gives you a chance to calmly, peacefully collect your thoughts and prepare mentally and emotionally for the day ahead.

This works whether you do it with kids and/or a partner, or you’re solo.

Personally I think it’s worth whatever effort is involved to go to bed early enough to wake up early enough to have a good solid 45 minutes or an hour for breakfast each morning, if you can pull it off.

Only agree to new commitments when both your head and your heart say yes.

Oblique Strategies (subtitled over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas) is a set of published cards created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. Now in its fifth edition, it was first published in 1975. Each card contains a phrase or cryptic remark which can be used to break a deadlock or dilemma situation.

They can be used as a pack, or by drawing a single card from the shuffled pack when a dilemma occurs in a working situation. In this case the card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear…

In the film Slacker, a character offers passers-by cards from an Oblique Strategies deck. Strategies mentioned are “Honor thy error as a hidden intention,” “Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify,” “Not building a wall; making a brick,” “Repetition is a form of change,” and the one which came to be seen as a summary of the film’s ethos (though it was not part of the official set of Oblique Strategies), “Withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy.”

Instructions: download the PDF file and print it out on a laser printer onto card/cover stock. Most laser printers provide the ability to hand feed stock and open up the rear end to provide a straight paper path. Crop marks are provided for cutting the finished stock. I found using a metal ruler and a heavy duty razor black works better than a paper cutter.

Let’s talk about gear first. You’ll need a small, portable notebook to keep all your images and written prompts in.

It was created as a way to quickly generate new ideas when your mind goes blank. While Oblique Strategies decks are hard to obtain these days, you can use this concept and the Portable Muse idea to hack together your own Oblique Strategies deck.

Oblique Strategies is a deck of cards first published by Brian Eno that contained a cryptic quote, question or remark on them to get your mind thinking.

Once you’ve read the words on the card(s): follow the direction on the card or write down your thoughts and reactions to the images on the card and what they mean to you. It’s that simple.